First regular weather forecast

The first daily weather forecast began on 31 July 1861 and was the work of the Meteorological Department of the British Board of Trade (the ancestor of today's Met Office). The forecast, written by the head of department, Robert FitzRoy, was added to the "Wind and Weather Report" that was distributed to British newspapers for printing the following day.

Robert FitzRoy is today most commonly remembered as the Navy captain who accommodated the young Charles Darwin on his ship, the Beagle, during its round-the-world voyage from 1831 to 1836. Fitzroy was a sharply intelligent man from a wealthy and well-connected family, but his abrasive personality and unwillingness to compromise kept him from ever rising very far through the ranks of the Navy.

When the British government announced plans to form a meteorological service in 1853, FitzRoy enthusiastically volunteered his services. He was in many ways a good fit for the role, well-read in various scientific subjects and with years of practical experience in weather observation as a ship's captain.

Taking stock of his new role in 1854, he remarked to a friend that the task ahead of him required mastery of a impossibly wide range of disparate subjects, "tides, currents, winds, temperature, magnetism, electricity, and the atmosphere". Nonetheless, he set about organizing a network of weather observation stations and standardized measuring equipment, with the aim of providing both data for scientists and useful forecasts for mariners.

The importance of the second of these goals was clearly demonstrated on 25 October 1859 when a massive storm swept across the British isles. A total of 343 ships were sunk over three days, including the ironclad passenger steamer Royal Charter, which went down with the loss of 444 lives.

In the aftermath of this catastrophe, FitzRoy reworked the Meteorological Department's observation infrastructure, connecting the stations by telegraph to allow for near-real-time data to be sent to his central office, where it could be analysed. He also made an agreement in April 1860 to share information with his French counterpart, Urbain LeVerrier. By December 1860, he had 13 telegraph-connected weather stations in the British Isles, and data from another five in France. If the signs of a coming storm were spotted, the same telegraph network was then used to pass warnings to the relevant observation stations, who would distribute them locally and raise signals on masts visible from nearby harbours.

The first of these storm warnings, "Caution – Gale threatening from south-west, and then northward" was sent to stations in Aberdeen, Hull, Yarmouth and Dover on 6 February 1861. Unfortunately, the area that was worst affected by the ensuing storm – along the east coast from Newcastle upon Tyne to Whitby – was not yet covered by FitzRoy's warning system. According to contemporary reports, 135 vessels were lost. FitzRoy wrote letters to several newspapers in the aftermath suggesting this figure would have been far lower if he had the resources to distribute his warnings more widely.

By the summer of 1861, FitzRoy's department was receiving data from 43 stations in the British Isles and 18 stations around Europe (including as far afield as St Petersburg in Russia and Madrid in Spain). With this increased number of observation points, and a few years of weather data to compare it to, the Meteorological Department began distributing a simple two-day forecast along with the daily weather summaries that were wired to British newspapers.

The Meteorological Department's first published weather forecast, written by FitzRoy himself, was as follows:

"General weather probable during the next two days in the –

North – Moderate, westerly wind; fine.

West - Moderate, south-westerly; fine.

South – Fresh, westerly; fine."

The addition of the forecast seems to have taken many newspaper editors by surprise however, as only a handful printed this extra information at first. Various papers typeset the forecast section and added it to the existing report over the next week or so. It's not clear why Fitzroy missed "East" off the first day's forecast, but it was present from the second forecast onwards.

The creation of these weather forecasts lifted meteorology from a relatively obscure abstract science to a high-profile public service, with both positive and negative consequences. FitzRoy could argue for more resources and earned a great deal of public prestige, but the vagueness and often questionable accuracy of his forecasts – which were compiled by hand using what would today be considered incredibly patchy data – opened him up to criticism from the prominent scientists of his age.

By the mid-1860s, criticism of FitzRoy and the Meteorological department was growing in the corridors of power. Despite the public still being supportive of his work, many influential figures felt that his forecasts were not worth the Meteorological Department's ballooning budget. In 1865, FitzRoy's costs for telegraph fees alone were £5,460 (equal to £643,600 adjusted for CPI inflation, or £4.7 million relative to average wages). FitzRoy took all this criticism extremely personally, engaging in ill-tempered disputes with prominent scientists and government officials while his mental and physical health declined.

In the spring of 1865, FitzRoy began to sink into one of the dark periods of depression that Charles Darwin had come to know so well during their voyage on the Beagle. Overworked, with money troubles and facing criticism from all sides, on 30 April Robert FitzRoy took his own life.

His death was a devastating blow to the Meteorological Department. It continued to publish forecasts under FitzRoy's old deputy Thomas Babbington, but without FitzRoy to defend it, the organization's scientific and political critics had the upper hand. Ordered to cease publication of the forecasts and return to merely collecting data, the last Daily Weather Report was published on 28 May 1866. They were not restarted until 1879.